Adios, Christopher Hitchens

Adios, Christopher Hitchens

No one could exactly be taken by surprise at the new that Christopher Hitchens has lost his life to cancer. (I was going to lapse into the “battle” metaphor, but he would despise that—as he did every—cliché.) I first discovered Hitchens when he was writing for The Nation; at that time, his was not an entirely contrarian voice: he spoke in the tradition of his great moral and stylistic hero, George Orwell, a man who was equally uncomfortable with the clichés of both the Left and the Right. It was distressing to witness the impact of the 9/11 attacks on Hitchens, who found them reason enough to embrace the neoliberal arrogance of Paul Wolfowitz and his zany crew of warmongers. That said, Hitchens was the only voice in favor of the Iraq War to make an honest, albeit unconvincing, moral case for it. In the end, Hitchens was always a moralist, and never more so than when he was attacking religion. The idea that human beings should check their rationality at any given temple door struck him as immoral—a sin, one might say, against human potential. For Hitchens was essentially a Humanist—the ground from which he attacked Fundamentalism in all its guises: religious, cultural, political, even artistic. I for one will miss both his incisiveness and his erudition.

2 Comments

Well, Conrad, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, of course. But “Lenin’s” brief against Hitchens is confusing. Hitchens, in the negative, was supposedly:<br />(1) conventional<br />(2) provincial<br />(3) a defender of empire<br />(4) weak in the realm of literary theory<br />(5) weak in the realm of theology (i.e., a purveyor of “demotic” theological arguments)<br />(6) vulgarly anti-Muslim<br /

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Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2018, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs two programs: Arts & Culture and Global Affairs.